Like a Storm of Lions
by Jedi Buttercup
Summary: Most of the mercs I've faced over the course of my life have been nothing special. But there've been a few that were something... other: man-shaped predators whose eyes turn black as night when your animal side is closest to the fore.


**Title:** Like a Storm of Lions

 **Author:** Jedi Buttercup

 **Disclaimer:** The words are mine; the worlds are not

 **Rating:** PG-15/Mature

 **Summary:** _Most of the mercs I've faced over the course of my life have been nothing special. But there've been a few that were something... other: man-shaped predators whose eyes turn black as night when your animal side is closest to the fore._ 2400 words.

 **Spoilers:** Set during Riddick (2013); very post-series/fusion for Grimm

 **Notes:** Fusion-verse/canon divergence ahoy. First person POV; a few lines are quoted from the movie. Written for hiddencait, who asked for: "Riddick + Grimm. Mostly I'm thinking Riddick as some kind of a Wesen, though damned if I know what kind. That or hell, maybe Jack is or Riddick adopts a more animalistic Wesen (because we know he's got a thing for large pets)?" Originally posted elsewhere Dec 6.

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Most of the mercs I've faced over the course of my life have been nothing special. Little men, trying to make themselves feel bigger. Big men, trying to make themselves feel quicker. Cut any one of them open, and they're all missing something. Box boy's crew was like that; I hadn't even had to stretch to cut their number nearly in half in a single night. But there've been a few that were something... other.

I knew, even before I was close enough to see the man's eyes, that the leader of the second crew of mercs was one of _those_. And a damn dangerous specimen, too, by the gray in his hair; that kind seemed to either burn out early, or sharpen into a lethal edge in both body and mind. A Grimm, I'd heard one of my fellow cons call them once: man-shaped predators whose eyes turn black as night when your animal side is closest to the fore.

Of course, mine never entirely fades anymore, not since my eyes turned silver in Butcher Bay. Billy Badass was the first merc to notice, but not the last. I've never met another quite like me, though I have met a few with other animal natures; the permanently light-sensitive eyes seem to be unique to certain Furyans, and I'm the only Furyan left.

Would this Grimm know what they signified? Maybe even know the name the Furyans had called themselves? Impossible to tell at a distance. I shed my cloak, pulled my knives out of their sheaths, and dropped them to the dusty, brown-gold soil of the steppe, striding to meet him and his hangers-on halfway.

He disarmed as well, walking well ahead of the others. Whatever'd gone down in the way station after I left my second message must have left quite the impression on box boy- Santana- and the big jamoke with him. The check in their strides and the shift of their shoulders conveyed a wary resentfulness by contrast with the Grimm's natural confidence; good for me, not so much for them. Every wedge between the two teams was a weakness I could exploit.

I looked past the man, toward Santana, and got straight to the point. "So what's the bounty at?"

Santana wasn't the one that answered, though. The Grimm spoke up instead, ignoring my little power play. He said he wasn't interested in the bounty- and strangely enough, I believed him when he said it, though I wouldn't have if that flat statement had come from either of the others. He followed it up with his real reason, though... and that brought back a _whole_ lot of memories.

"What I'm interested in," he said, his expression a forbidding wall, "is a little backwater place with a system code M-344 slash G. I want to know what happened there ten years ago."

M-344/G; better known as the Dark Planet. Or Hades. Burnt to a cinder every twenty-two year long day; taken over by hungry creatures all tooth and sonar during the long night that follows. I seem to make a habit of getting stranded on worlds filled with predators that would give any sane man nightmares. Only one reason for a merc like him to know such an out of the way system code: if he- or someone he knew- had been there. If something that had happened there _meant_ something to him.

I gave the man a slow, sardonic smile as the thunder of the incoming storm rumbled behind me. There'd been a Grimm on the _Hunter-Gratzner_ , too: the only merc who'd ever managed to catch me more than once. One of the burnouts in the end, but he'd been dangerously competent before the morphine had started rotting his brain. Which had to make this...

"The father. Big Daddy Johns."

"Yeah, that's right," he replied, a muscle jumping in his jaw.

"And you came all this way just to see me. I'm flattered."

"Well, it's kind of strange not knowing what to put down in the family Bible."

Interesting way of putting it; not 'what to tell his mother', not 'write on his tombstone.' Even if no one had ever gone back for the bodies and the cargo- and a big corporation like that? I was betting they had- most people made some kind of memorial. Had a wake, or some other ritual remembrance of the dead. Did Grimms have different customs? How about my people? Quirks like that made a guy wonder. But then, I've always been on the fringes, kicked to the bottom, clawing my way to every advantage I ever got. What do _I_ know of normal?

I _did_ know I couldn't have asked for a better opener. The clouds had dimmed the sunlight enough not to immediately blind me; I reached up slowly and slid the goggles off, lifting my eyebrows at the Grimm.

"Guess," I said.

He stiffened, nostrils flaring- and his eyes did the bottomless pit thing, that infinite darkness that seems to make most like I am wet their pants at the sight. Supposed to make you see your true nature reflected, or some shit like that; at least, that's what they tell me. But then, I've never had any illusions about what I am.

"Quercylurus," he growled- a word I'd never heard before. "So it's true, then. There was a survivor of Furya."

"So that's what they called us," I tilted my head at him, intrigued. Billy Boy hadn't known; but then, by the time he'd been born my planet had already been wrecked by the Necromongers and Lord Marshal Zhylaw had erased all its records. No reason for Johns' father to tell him. "A little ironic that a merc who wants me dead is literally the first person who's told me one true thing about my past."

A frown knitted between Johns' brows; it looked like he was about to say something else, but Santana had finally had enough at that point. "I hate to interrupt this discussion about ancient history," the swaggering merc said, moving forward to block my line of sight to Johns, "but maybe I should step in right here and introduce myself."

That made a pretty good opener, too; one also too good to ignore. I cut the posturing merc short with a few mocking words, let him talk himself into a corner; I got the impression his manhood had taken several hits since he'd arrived on-planet, and wondered that Johns' blonde second had let him keep _any_ of it in the little beat-down I'd personally witnessed. Even Johns looked wryly amused by the time I turned the conversation back to what I was there for... suitably adjusted for the unexpected wrinkle.

"Three down, eight left. Now normally, I'd just keep going. But things are changing here. Nobody wants to be on this planet twenty-four hours from now. And it sounds like you and I are overdue for a conversation."

"And how exactly is that supposed to work?" Johns crossed his arms over his stylish body armor.

"I'll leave one node out in the open. Theirs," I nodded toward the scruffier pair. "They take it and go. Then I bring the other node to the station. We talk. If you still want to kill me at the end of that conversation... we revisit the arrangement. If not, you drop me at the first off-world port you see." A risky move, but one I thought would pay off. Johns wanted the truth from me; I wanted the truth from him. Seemed like a fair exchange. And even if he was as weak-spined as his son, he seemed real attached to the appearance of being _fair_. Might hold.

"And nobody gets the bounty, is that it?" Santana interrupted, incredulously. "You think we are all that big of fools? Or was this one in your pocket all along?" He turned a suspicious eye on Johns.

"I think you have until the rain hits that station to make up your mind," I shrugged, amused at the half-offended consternation in Johns' expression. Then I turned to walk away.

Three steps later, everything went to shit. Santana pulled some kind of hold out weapon from his boot, the jackal leaped out of the scrub to defend me, Johns barked some kind of order to Dahl... and I pulled my first full shift since escaping to the surface of Crematoria, burning my paws up trying to outrace a deadly sunrise.

I abruptly missed Jack with a fierce, intense pang: the sleeker, more elegant shape of her other form bounding after me, tail lashing and dark silky fur choked with gray ash, as much as the half-starved kitten she'd been the first time I'd met her. Full form's like that, intensifying all my emotions, sharpening my senses and dragging up associations long-buried under mostly human memories. I'm just as big that way as I am the rest of the time, but built more like some kind of stocky, four-legged, long-backed predator; my clothes split away at the seams, designed that way on purpose just in case, and my boots slid right off my reshaped feet. Instinct took over, and I lunged, swatting the jackal out of the danger zone with one massive paw.

I don't have much executive function, in that form; I don't know whether or not Vaako was being literal when he talked about the last charge of Furya as being like a storm of lions, but it's an apt description of how I felt in that moment. My teeth were tearing out box boy's throat before the first medicinal-smelling round flew by close enough to leave a bloody crease in the fur of my cheek, and before Johns' sniper could adjust to fire a second I'd lunged for the other moron, knocking him flat and sending the rifle he'd grabbed for flying.

Fingers are a lot more dexterous than paws; I couldn't pick the rifle up myself like that. But I could grapple with him, sinking my teeth in the meat of his shoulder and turning him as the second tranq bullet flew toward me. It hit him in the back of the neck, and he slumped back to the dirt with a groan.

I pulled off him, shifting back as I moved, and held my hands up, raising my eyebrows at Johns. I was careful not to let him see the tremor in my arms; the other reason I don't shift outside of dire emergency, aside from the way it makes it hard to actually execute a plan, is how much energy it takes out of me when I do.

He looked torn, but he got the message, eyes darting askance down my naked form and then back up to my face- then past me to the jackal, who'd shaken off the strike and padded back to my side, giving off a warning growl.

"Dahl, that's enough," he said, holding up one hand in a fist.

I grinned at him again, wiping the last of Santana's blood off my mouth. Maybe he did have more mettle to him than his son, and not just a better run of luck. "I didn't ghost him, you know," I decided to offer. "Your son. Weren't my teeth that ended him. I _was_ there when it happened, though."

"Billy may not have told me about you- God only knows why- but he did tell me about every other wesen on the passenger roster for that flight. You expect me to believe a fuchsbau like the Montgomery woman or an eisbiber like Ogilvie somehow managed to bite _my_ son to death?"

I was pretty sure 'wesen' was the word for everyone who sometimes sprouted fur or feathers or scales, but I'd never heard of fuchsbau or eisbiber; Jack hadn't known much more than I had, after running away from home the first time she'd triggered a shift and her adoptive family had panicked. "I expect you to make the deal for the rest of the story. Four down now, Johns. And the odds'll get a lot longer when the storm hits us. I'd rather have the nodes dug up by then."

"How do I know you'll even tell me the truth?"

"What's the percentage in lying?" I shrugged, reaching down to scritch the fur along the jackal's jawline. "Ship's owners gotta have records from the investigation, and if he was part of your guild, there gotta be other guys who used to run with your son. Whatever I tell you, you'll be able to prove or disprove at least a part of it. I got a lot fewer ways of verifying _your_ story."

His expression shifted again at that; frustrated or hopeful, it was hard to read the details with those deep, fathomless eyes drawing all the focus. "Put some goddamn clothes on first; it's fucking distracting."

"Aw, Johns. You like what you see?" I couldn't resist the barb as I stooped to pick up my goggles; with them on, his eyes went back to the same shade I remembered from his son's. "Gonna need to borrow your sewing kit for the rest; ripped all the seams out in that shift."

His snarl at that was a thing of beauty to behold- but I'd taken the high ground from him, and he knew it.

"Moss, Larkspur; bring two of the jet-hogs out. Restraints for Diaz, plastic wrap for Santana, and a dolly to carry them back on," he ordered, touching the comm in his ear. "And a set of spare fatigues out of station storage. Me and Riddick are going to go for a little drive."

I didn't hear what they said back to him; didn't need to. But he carried the point, glowering at me the whole time.

"No weapons. And if you set so much as a claw out of line..." he threatened, retrieving his gun.

"Now why would I do that? Seems to me like this game's just getting started. I'd hate to spoil the ending before we even arrive."

"It's not the ending you should be worried about right now; it's the next step in front of you," Johns growled.

The whine of engines split the air in counterpoint to the thunder rumbling closer over the steppe.

"Story of my life," I grinned at him. "I think you and me are gonna scrape along just fine."

-x-


End file.
